~ Perspective from Vancouver

Category Archives: Quotes

The idea of Trump writing an autobiography didn’t originate with either Trump or Schwartz. It began with Si Newhouse, the media magnate (of) Advance Publications …

Newhouse called Trump about the project, then visited him to discuss it. Random House continued the pursuit with a series of meetings. At one point, Howard Kaminsky, who ran Random House then, wrapped a thick Russian novel in a dummy cover that featured a photograph of Trump looking like a conquering hero; at the top was Trump’s name, in large gold block lettering. Kaminsky recalls that Trump was pleased by the mockup, but had one suggestion: “Please make my name much bigger.”

On Tuesday I cracked myself up in prep for an evening with Janette Sadik-Khan (JSK), former NYCDOT Transportation Commissioner and author of Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution. Here are the highlights.

Whether you livestreamed it under the covers or attended at the Vancouver Playhouse, you probably had at least one moment of inspiration, imagining the delight that street transformation can bring to where you live. What if the City of Vancouver became the largest real-estate developer in town like JSK was for NYC?

Her statistics were all US based but we’re used to that. When we translate their numbers to our population, the information is uncomfortably more relevant than we would like. She included in her slides pictures of Vancouver and local examples to go with them. For those of us who attended her last visit, a few of the NYC successes were the same and still had a stunning, audible impact on attendees; she has more data to back her up now. She is confident and motivating.

Gordon Price is consistently a top-notch moderator and interviewer. He was a gracious Canadian host, animated, and entertaining. He had a great rapport with JSK. Price asked the pertinent questions and got solid answers.

What’s as interesting is who attended. At $5 a ticket, there were all ages and abilities present. I wondered how many business owners or BIA staff were there. Did Nick Pogor attend?

Unfortunately, I didn’t catch all of the electeds who introduced themselves from my perch on the balcony. I was pleased to see Vancouver’s Deputy Mayor Heather Deal front and center, who is also a Councillor Liaison to the City’s Active Transportation Policy Council and Arts & Culture Policy Council, among others. It was announced for the first time publicly that Lon LaClaire is the new City of Vancouver Director of Transportation. He introduced JSK. At least one Park Board Commissioner attended.

There was at least one City Councillor from New Westminster, Patrick Johnstone there – a fan of 30kph. I was tickled that Nathan Pascal, City Councillor for Langley City was there in his first week on the job! I was even more delighted to hear that the Mayor of Abbotsford Henry Braun was there. It symbolizes a shift in decision-makers toward at least open ears and at most safer, healthier city centres in the Lower Mainland.

The first rule of Hollywood is: Always thank the crew.

JSK started by thanking the 4500 within New York City’s Department of Transportation. She acknowledged that they implemented the changes her team tried – often quickly. Being fast and keeping the momentum up is key.

Interview well. Be yourself. Be bold.

When JSK was interviewing for the top transportation job with then NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, he asked: Why do you want to be Traffic Commissioner? She answered: I don’t. I want to be Transportation Commissioner.

A City’s assets – the public realm – need to reflect current values. Invest in the best use of public space.

JSK on streets: “If you didn’t change your major capital asset in 50-60 years, would you still be in business?”

“We transformed places to park [cars] to places people wanted to be…we created 65,000 square feet of public space with traffic cones.” “Broadway alone was 2.5 acres of new public space.”

JSK talked about the imbalance between the space for cars and space for people. Crowded sidewalks of slow walking tourists that fast-walking New Yorkers were willing to walk in car lanes to pass or avoid. In Vancouver, we already see this imbalance in our shopping districts and entertainment corridors.

She appreciated working for a Mayor who would back her up on her bold suggestions and who asked her to take risks because it was the right thing to do.

Consultation + Visualization = Education + Transformation

“People find it hard to visualize from drawings and boards. Create temporary space and program it.” Basically: traffic cones, paint, and planters are your friends.

“We need to do a better job of showing the possible on our streets.”

“Involve people in the process…Just try it out. Pilot it. We [all already] know the streets aren’t perfect.”

She estimated that once [in 5-10 years] shared, driverless cars are operating in our cities, most of our on-street parking won’t be needed. In the meantime, one of the many community requested programs is time-of-day based pricing for on-street parking. Of course, the higher turnover of vehicles is better for business.

Even better for business is putting in bicycle lanes. Some of the areas where businesses were most opposed have some of the highest bike volumes now.

The Times Square portion of Broadway, Phase I Transformation. LEFT: Before; RIGHT: The Broadway Overhaul. Phase II it became a 58,000-square-foot pedestrian plaza. (Photo: Courtesy of the New York City Department of Transportation )

Results

It takes 4 things to increase bicyclist volumes significantly and NYC does them all.

a network of bicycle infrastructure (and traffic-calming design)

lower speed limits (and traffic-calming designs help)

bikeshare

ciclovias

JSK saw 3 of the above steps to fruition. Mayor de Blasio lowered speed limits to 25mph in November, 2014.

When Broadway closed to cars and opened to people, in Midtown:

pedestrian injuries decreased by 35%

motorists injuries went down by 35%

vehicle travel times increased by 17%

protected bike lanes brought a 50% increase in sales

Ciclovias, Car-free Spaces and Street Art

“The Public Domain is the Public’s Domain.”

“We asked the community where they wanted plazas and they took ownership of them.”

“The canvas of our streets was transformed by artists.”

Ciclovias involve closing streets to vehicles and allowing people to roam on them via any active transportation mode, often on weekends. In NYC it’s known as Summer Streets. Every Saturday in the summer from 7am-1pm they have about 300,000 people take part. Small businesses along the way have seen sales increase by 71%.

On making parts of Robson Street a car-free space, JSK said: “Try it; you’ll like it.”

Three words: Dedicated. Bus. Lanes.

These are enforced by cameras. Green traffic lights are synchronized with bus use. Like in Colombia, they have off-board fare collection. [Senior planners at TransLink would love dedicated bus lanes on Georgia Street, Hastings Street, or Broadway in Vancouver.]

NYC needs to up our game on the following:

more bikeshare next to low-income housing and public housing

#VisionZero “Our streets are sick. Thousands are dying and people are blasé about it. In any other field you would lose your job if that many died.”

seamless, integrated, multi-modal transportation (all on one card/app) like in Helsinki

congestion pricing. The state capital is less urban and turned down their request for it. Plus people hate both “congestion”and “pricing”. The rebrand is MoveNY. JSK said paying more to drive to Manhattan is “inevitable”.

Migration Astonishment: 1M here, 1M there

I was astonished (and by the looks of it so was Gordon Price) that NYC estimates that they will have 1 million more people living there by 2030. That’s the same number we expect in Metro Vancouver by 2030! Clearly, the impact here will be a much larger transformation. There’s a lot of work to do.

JSK advised: “Leverage the density. Recognize the value of density.”

“People want safe streets (and affordable housing) and are ahead of politicians and the media.”

Janette Sadik-Khan, former NYCDOT Commissioner and new author of Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, best known for making New York City’s Broadway car-free, will give a talk in Vancouver this evening at the Vancouver Playhouse.

For urbanist geeks this is the event of the year. Like a Blondie concert for Blondie fans or a Back Street Boys concert for BSB fans. You get the idea.

Some City of Vancouver staff will get a chance to have a private Q&A with her today. What will they ask without the eyes of the public on them? Chances are they’ll be inspired to take action.

Tickets are sold out. The last time she was here a venue of 350 free tickets sold out. This time, with tickets at $5 each and a venue of 668 seats, it’s still a sold out show. If you’re lucky enough to be going tonight, here’s how to seem cool about it.

Call her JSK when referring to her, assuming everyone knows who that is, like a true urbanist.

Dress urbane but without cultural appropriation. Wear a maximum of 1 scarf if you have a short neck.

Buy 2 tickets and arrive alone. Pick someone hovering hopefully at the event, ask them what mode they took to get there, and invite them to go with you regardless of their answer. It’s an easy way to seem super generous.

Be seen. Arrive early, grab a good seat, then stand to schmooze with others as they arrive. Totally ignore the SCARP student you gave a free ticket to. You’re from the Lost Generation and they don’t know how good they have it.

Use the following phrases and matching gestures: “This is not Amsterdam.” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge); “If you can remake it here, you can remake it anywhere.” (pistol wink nod); and “In G-d we trust, everyone else bring data.” (look serious but patient-with-others, adjust prescription glasses with one hand).

Know that the last phrase above was said by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Or everyone at the Mayor’s Office. Call him Mike Bloomberg.

Bring a list of 10 new projects, find any decision-maker or even minor influencer at the City and demand that all 10 be built before the end of 2018. Make sure Kingsway and Commercial Drive are on your list.

Go to the mic to ask a question but instead announce your Bike Rave. Explain it’s not the official Bike Rave and not the alternate bike rave but your own bike rave.

Bring your copy of JSK’s book. Wait for an hour after the talk to get it signed, while preparing an intelligent question. Get dragged out by security when they announce Ms. Sadik-Khan can’t sign any more books because her hand has cramped.

Have a drink with friends, comparing her last talk to this one. Say “last time her focus was on making it seem simple and doable – a lot of paint and planters. This time seemed more strategic”. Confess you’re jealous of her lack of public consultation.

Drunk on ideas and inspired with a vision of what you’d like your City to look like, send an email to mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca to tell them to go ahead, do more. You support it. After all, jesting aside, a misspelled-slightly-incoherent note is better than no note at all.

“Every time we go through this, it seems to be the same pattern. There’s predictions there’s going to be ‘Carmageddon,’” Price said. “Every time it doesn’t happen. And then we go on to the next one, and have to go through the whole cycle again.”

A year and half after the city raised an uproar by shutting a stretch of Point Grey Road to vehicles to make way for a bike lane, travel time for buses and cars is almost identical to what it was before the closure, according to data released Monday.

The city monitored how re-routing extra cars to Macdonald Street would affect the 22 bus re-route using “extremely detailed” GPS data and found travel times to be “so similar it’s hard to say whether there’s a change,” said Lon LaClaire, Vancouver’s acting director of transportation. “

“It’s pretty much the same,” LaClaire said. “There’s no real interesting story there.”

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But of course the interesting story here is that there’s no interesting story. Imagine if the delay had been even 5 minutes. Carmageddon!

It’s so frustrating when confident predictions of bad things don’t happen, but it’s important to acknowledge for the next proposal of a greenway or bike lane. Let’s see if we get any.

Yeah, according to the City’s engineers, traffic flow may well improve. But more importantly, the reconfiguration of the Burrard-Pacific intersection will significantly improve safety for all and, as we have learned already, will continue to increase the number of people walking and cycling.

So does traffic flow – that is, of motor-vehicles – trump every other consideration? In which case, George, here’s the question: even if the traffic flow was not improved, would you vote against the changes?

“Every time we go through this, it seems to be the same pattern. There’s predictions there’s going to be ‘Carmageddon,’” Price said. “Every time it doesn’t happen. And then we go on to the next one, and have to go through the whole cycle again.”

Clark, who voted Yes, said while it was important to ask people what they thought about the funding source, she added that: “We will find a way to make sure we continue to build transit in the province.”

Remind us: why are we then having a referendum? And when you come up with a way to make sure we continue to build transit, will we have to have another?

Everyone agrees that our rail system is frail and accident-prone … And everyone knows that American infrastructure—what used to be called our public works, or just our bridges and railways, once the envy of the world—has now been stripped bare, and is being stripped ever barer. …

What is less apparent, perhaps, is that the will to abandon the public way is not some failure of understanding, or some nearsighted omission by shortsighted politicians. It is part of a coherent ideological project. …

What an ideology does is give you reasons not to pursue your own apparent rational interest—and this cuts both ways, including both wealthy people in New York who, out of social conviction, vote for politicians who are more likely to raise their taxes, and poor people in the South who vote for those devoted to cutting taxes on incomes they can never hope to earn. There is no such thing as false consciousness. There are simply beliefs that make us sacrifice one piece of self-evident interest for some other, larger principle. …

Part of this, of course, is the … reality that the constitutional system is rigged for rural interests over urban ones. … Mass transit goes begging while farm subsidies flourish.

What we have … is a political class, and an entire political party, devoted to the idea that any money spent on public goods is money misplaced, not because the state goods might not be good but because they would distract us from the larger principle that no ultimate good can be found in the state. … Trains have to be resisted, even if it means more pollution and massive inefficiency and falling ever further behind in the amenities of life—what Olmsted called our “commonplace civilization.” …

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

“Among other waste and damage done, one of the possible casualties seems to be the public’s feelings about public transit itself, in a region that has long appreciated what transit does to positively shape our lives and our home. Many involved in region-building in Canada, again myself included, are now insisting that no matter what happens with this referendum, we should never use this polarizing, wasteful tool for this kind of complex decision-making in Canada again.”

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It’s a critical point: win or lose, there needs to be a decision, before the results of the current referendum are announced, as to whether, based on an ill-considered political promise, referenda are the new normal for determining the future of our transportation systems and the direction of our region.

If this one is the precedent, then the next referendum should be on approval of the Massey crossing and the related plans of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, since in the event of no, they will prevail by default. If that’s an unacceptable scenario, then other voices need to be heard to end them now. No more referenda, no more damage done.

The Compass program — including fare gates and electronic fare cards — will never pay for itself on the basis of fares collected from reduced fare evasion. As blogger and transit insider Stephen Rees has long documented, TransLink’s studies continually made this fiscally key point — to no avail. The province, through then-Minister of Transportation Kevin Falcon, ignored these statements, leaving TransLink with hastily negotiated money from the provincial and federal governments and requiring them to move forward as they, not we the public, deemed necessary.

Bateman’s main tactic in marshalling opposition to the sales tax hike for transit is spotlighting TransLink’s record of injudicious spending. … The Taxpayers Federation argues that any needed regional transportation improvements can be financed by reallocating funds from future municipal budgets, expected to grow at 4.8 per cent annually over the next while. …

Bateman says he does not himself use transit or confront a regular commute, although he drives to appointments throughout the region. The family owns a Prius and a minivan.

“In urban Langley, where I live, the transit service is so poor around town that it’s virtually unusable.”

In the event the referendum fails, people will say: ‘We didn’t vote against transit, we voted against Translink. We still need more transportation investment.’ And the Province will say: ‘But you voted against more taxes. Sorry, there’s no money available for Metro – certainly not hundreds of millions – given our tight fiscal situation.’

In which case, remember this item. From Vaughan Palmer, the Sun’s legislative columnist:

… it would appear that the only major tax change in the offing this year (barring passage of the regional sales tax to support TransLink) is one that was legislated into place two years ago. Before the last election, the Liberals brought in a higher tax bracket for people with taxable incomes greater than $150,000. But the enabling legislation also provided for the automatic phase out of the higher tax bracket after two years, effective Dec. 31.

De Jong confirmed Thursday there are no plans to bring in legislation to extend the rate. Hence it will be gone at the end of the year, delivering a tax reduction worth about $200 million to the highest income-earners.

I often use a quote from Michael Lewis, author of the “The Big Short” (soon to be a major motion picture), on the subprime collapse that led to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008:

These people (on Wall Street) believed that the collapse of the subprime mortgage market was unlikely precisely because it would be such a catastrophe. Nothing so terrible could ever actually happen.

Once a risk-taker has ruled out the possibility of system failure, then, logically, it’s possible if not imperative to double-down on your bet. If something truly awful can’t happen because it would be so truly awful, then you can make lots of money by betting that the truly awful won’t happen. That is basically what Credit Default Swaps were all about. Didn’t work out so well for AIG. Or us.

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Lewis’s latest book is “Flash Boys” (should be a major motion picture, lots of Canadian content). And here’s the quote I’ll be using from it:

Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw it up further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others.

That, I think, analogously explains much of the carbon business and related endeavours like motordom. Or to adapt the Lewis quote:

Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the environment, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to exploit it further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others.

Looking out 10, 20 years, the one biggest shift that I think the area should be aware of is we do face some challenges in terms of global warming and climate change …

We think we need to see a change in the urban form. We need to see more density. We need to see more opportunities for more high-rises, because that is much friendlier in terms of environmental and greenhouse gas output.

That, I think, is something that is going to be a pretty significant shift as we go forward.

– Then Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon

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Tyee writer Andrew MacLeod says Falcon made those remarks at the time of the May 2008 opening of William R. Bennett Bridge in Kelowna, with the bridge’s namesake former premier the guest of honour at the $140,000 ribbon-cutting celebration.

“Bennett said at the time the government should immediately get started on the next crossing, but it was an idea Falcon strongly opposed …”

Times and the government have changed. Now it’s more Motordom, with the brakes off:

Less than six years after opening a new bridge across Okanagan Lake, the British Columbia government is spending $2 million to begin planning another crossing.